Author: DVO

Words give us meaning. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we can’t make or remake reality, but the words we choose to name our reality can lift us from the humdrum of everyday experience. Jesus said to his disciples in response to their grumbling about his teaching on the bread of life, which led to their leaving him: “Do you want to walk away too?” Peter answers: “Lord, to whom else can we go? You have the message of eternal life.” Peter’s words, on the surface, express an unwanted humility and helplessness that sometimes beset us all: “I have no alternative! I’m so invested in this relationship that now I have no other options. I’m stuck with this!” That’s a humble place to stand, knowing that one no longer has another practical choice. But those words also express a much deeper quandary, namely, where can I find meaning if I cannot find it in faith in God? All of us have, at some point, asked ourselves that question. If I didn’t believe in God and had no faith or religion, what would give meaning to my life? Where can we go if we no longer have an explicit faith in God? A lot of places, it seems. There’s a stoicism that offers its own kind of salvation by drawing life and meaning simply from fighting chaos and disease. For some, meaning outside of explicit faith is found in leaving a lasting legacy on this earth, having children, achieving something monumental, or becoming a household name. And there are still others for whom deep meaning is found simply in being good for its own sake and in being honest for its own sake. But is this really the true meaning of life? Can anything other than faith and God quiet the restless fires within us? Well, it seems that there are places to go, and many go there, these places of positive energy, love, creativity, generosity, and honesty are also places where people seeking God outside of explicit faith can still have them meeting Him.

I read an article on the fact that expressing gratitude, even when you don’t think there is a lot to be grateful for, will make you grateful and happier. If you are a frequent reader of Daily Virtue, you know that most of my reading references come from articles written by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, for which I am eternally grateful, and this post comes from one such article on gratitude. The article tells us that some people are more naturally grateful than others, which comes from having a particular gene. We can actively choose to practice gratitude, which will make us happier. The brain takes that grateful attitude, even when you can’t see much to be thankful for, and processes it into happiness. Choosing to focus on good things makes you feel better than focusing on the bad. It also brings out the best in others around us. How do we make gratitude a routine, something that is part of our everyday living? We start with interior gratitude, which then becomes exterior expressions to others. Gratitude is the main point of the gospel on this Thanksgiving Day. This gospel story only appears in Luke as he stresses the theme of universalism. All can be saved, which was not the belief of the Jews at that time. Luke has already told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Remember how Jews despised Samaritans as not being really faithful. Now, there is another good Samaritan. This one is good not so much for what he did but because he realizes what God has done and responds in gratitude. Ten were healed, but the story tells us one was saved. The incident is about how the healing gratitude became the moment of salvation. Luke wants us to see how Jesus’ mission was to all, even those not like us. Thanksgiving is at the basis of faith in God. It is the profound realization that all I am and have is from God, and my whole life must be lived as a response to that to win my salvation. When you think about it, we all have much to be grateful for. We are incredibly blessed. To be thankful is to be a person of faith because we recognize where everything comes from. It is expressed in how we live our lives, recognizing God’s gift to us and becoming “gift” to others.

While being the Gospel that’s hardest on the rich, Luke’s Gospel is also the Gospel that makes most clear that riches aren’t bad in themselves. Notice that the first two servants doubled their wealth precisely in the measure that they risked it. This means that the one who truly has the divine life knows how to make it a gift, and that, in turn, will make the original gift increase. And the opposite holds: “From the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” This means that if you try to cling to the divine life, you will, in short order, lose it. God is rich. But God is prodigiously generous with that richness. God’s generosity, as we learn from the parables of Jesus, is so excessive that it’s scandalous. It upsets our measured sense of fairness. Fr. Ron Rolheiser points out that riches, be that money, talent, intelligence, health, good looks, leadership skills, or flat-out strength, are gifts from God. They’re good. It’s not riches that block us from entering the kingdom. Instead, it’s the danger that, having them, we will more easily also have the illusion that we’re self-sufficient. We aren’t. As Thomas Aquinas points out by the way he defines God as Esse Subsistens, a Self-sufficient Being, only God does not need anyone or anything else – but the rest of us do. Riches are good, but only if they’re shared. The moral danger in being rich is taking on the illusion of self-sufficiency that seems to forever accompany riches. Riches and their comfort can close our eyes to the plight and hunger of people experiencing poverty. In our comfort, we tend not to see the poor. That’s the danger of being wealthy, money-wise or otherwise.

The gospels point out that, before his conversion, Zacchaeus was a short man, someone lacking in height, but after his conversion, the tall man gave back what the small man had stolen. Meeting Jesus made Zacchaeus grow bigger in stature. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is what goodness does to us; it makes us grow taller. It’s interesting to note that the word “Gospel” means “good news,” not “good advice.” The gospels are not so much a spiritual and moral theology book that tells us what we should be doing but are more an account of what God has already done for us, is still doing for us, and the extraordinary dignity that this bestows on us. Of course, the idea is that since we are gifted in this way, our actions should reflect that dignity rather than what’s less lofty and pettier inside us. Morality is not a command; it’s an invitation, not a threat, but a reminder of who we truly are. We become taller and less petty when we remember what kind of family we ultimately come from. We all have two souls, two hearts, and two minds. Inside each of us, there’s a soul, heart, and mind that’s petty, that’s been hurt, that wants vengeance, that wants to protect itself, that’s frightened of what’s different, that’s prone to gossip, that’s racist, that perennially feels cheated. We are always both grand and petty. The world isn’t divided between big-hearted and small-minded people. Instead, our days are divided up between those moments when we are big-hearted, generous, warm, hospitable, unafraid, wanting to embrace everyone and those moments when we are petty, selfish, over-aware of the unfairness of life, frightened, and seeking only to protect ourselves and our own safety and interests. To walk tall means to walk within our God-given dignity. Nothing else, ultimately, gives us as large an identity. The teaching of the Gospel doesn’t shame us with our pettiness but invites us to what’s already best inside us.

Most Christians are familiar with a refrain that echoes through our Christian prayers and songs, an antiphon of hope addressed to God:  Grant that we may be one with all the saints in singing your praises! But we have an over-pious notion of what that would look like. We picture ourselves, one day, in heaven, in a choir with Mary, Jesus’ mother, with the great biblical figures of old, with the apostles and all the saints, singing praises to God, all the while feeling lucky to be there, given our moral and spiritual inferiority to these great spiritual figures. We picture ourselves spending eternity feeling grateful for having made a team whose talent level should have excluded us. Fr. Ron Rolheiser says this is nothing but a fantasy, pure and simple, mostly simple. What would it mean to be among the saints singing God’s praises? We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in the way we live our lives, when, like them, our lives are transparent, honest, grounded in personal integrity, with no skeletons in our closet. Being one with the saints in singing God’s praises is less about singing songs in our churches than about living honest lives outside them. We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we radiate God’s wide compassion; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we tend to widows, orphans, and strangers; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we work for peace; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises whenever we forgive each other; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, like them, we give away our time, talents, and our very lives in self-sacrifice without counting the cost; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in prayer; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in hope when we ground our vision and our energies in the promise of God and in the power that God revealed in the resurrection of Jesus; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises only when we live our lives as they lived theirs.

We are drowning in a sea of voices. Different voices tell us different things, and each voice seems to carry its own truth. On the one hand, there’s a powerful voice beckoning us towards self-sacrifice, self-denial, altruism, and heroism, telling us that happiness lies in giving life away, that selfishness will make us unhappy, and that we will only be ourselves when we are big-hearted, generous, and put the needs of others before our own. Deep down, we all know the truth of that; it is Jesus’ voice telling us that there is no greater love nor meaning than to lay down one’s life for others. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Francis of Assisi was right: we only receive by giving. And so we admire people who radiate that, and we feed our souls and those of our children with stories of heroism, selflessness, and bigness of heart. But that’s not the only voice we hear. We also hear a powerful, persistent voice seemingly calling us in the opposite direction. Superficially, this voice calls us towards pleasure, comfort, and security, the voice that tells us to take care of ourselves, drink in life’s pleasures to the full, and seize the day while it’s still ours to have. More profoundly, this voice challenges us not to be too timid or fearful to be a complete human being. This voice invites us to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy the incredible energy, color, wit, intelligence, and creativity that make the world go round and make life worth living. This is the voice beckoning us towards romance, creativity, art, sex, achievement, and physical health, the voice telling us Jesus’ parable of the talents and holding before us a truth too often neglected in religious circles, namely, that God is also the author of eros, color, physical health, wit, and intelligence. So, which is the real voice? There is no simple truth here or anywhere else. Truth is painfully complex (as are we); truth is always bigger than our capacity to absorb and integrate it. To be open to truth is to be perpetually stretched and perpetually in tension, at least on this side of eternity. And that’s true in terms of the seeming opposition between these voices. At times, they are in real opposition, and we can’t have it both ways but have to choose one to the detriment of the other. Truth has real boundaries, and there’s a danger in letting it mean everything. But there’s an equal danger in allowing it to mean too little, of reducing a full truth to a half-truth—and nowhere, at least in the spiritual life, is this danger more significant than in our tendency to let either of these voices completely blot out the other.

Recalling the interactions of Jesus and the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, we know that Jesus goes off to pray and asks the disciples to stay near him while he prays. After an hour of intense prayer, Jesus returns to find his disciples asleep. Did they fall asleep because it was dark or late, or had they just eaten food and wine from the Passover meal, or was it the emotional stress of dealing with Jesus’ impending prediction of his death? What caused them to be weary? Weariness can come in many forms and with many intentions. In this lesson, Jesus warns the disciples to remain firm in their faith, as faith and prayer go hand in hand. St Augustine comments, “In order to pray, let us believe; and for our faith not to weaken, let us pray. Faith causes prayer to grow, and when prayer grows, our faith is strengthened.” Our Lord has promised his Church that this reality will remain true to its mission until the end of time. The Church, therefore, cannot go off the path of true faith. But not everyone will remain faithful, and some will turn their backs on the faith of their own accord. In this way, our Lord warns us to help us stay watchful and persevere in faith and prayer even though people around us may fall away.

Our lives are a search for meaning, fulfillment, and even for pleasure, and this in fact is our search for God. Fr. Rolheiser writes that by nature, we search for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, play, humor, and pleasure. However, we tend not to see these pursuits as searching for God. In pursuing these things, we rarely, if ever, see them in any conscious way as our way of searching for God. In our minds, we are simply looking for happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and pleasure, and our search for God is something we need to do in another way, more consciously, through some explicit religious practices. St. Augustine struggled with exactly this. Reading his confession, we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, his realization that God was inside of him all the while but that he was not inside himself. This is a perennial struggle for us, too. Less evident in this confession and something that is also a perennial struggle for us is his recognition that for all those years, while he was searching for life in the world, a search he generally understood as having nothing to do with God, he was searching for God. What he was looking for in all those worldly things and pleasures was, in fact, the person of God. Given this reality, his confession might be recast this way: Late, late, have I loved you because I was outside of myself while all the while you were inside me, but I wasn’t home, and I had no idea it was you I was looking for in the world. I never connected that search to you. In my mind, I was not looking for you; I was looking for what would bring me meaning, love, significance, sexual fulfillment, knowledge, pleasure, and a prestigious career. I never connected my longing for these things with my longing for you. I had no idea that everything I was chasing, all those things I was lonely for, were already inside me, in you. Late, late, have I understood that. Late, late, have I learned that what I am so deeply hungry and lonely for is inside you. Everything I am lonely for is inside you, and you are inside me. Late, late, have I realized this. Our whole life is simply a search to respond to that divine madness inside us, a madness Christians identify with the infinite yearnings of the soul, a yearning for our God.

“Dear Hiring Manager, Thank you for your letter of November 1. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I cannot accept your refusal to offer me a position in your department. This year, I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals. Despite your company’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, your rejection does not meet my current needs. Therefore, I will assume the position in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then. Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.” The above letter was penned by a recent graduate who was frustrated with their inability to land a job despite attending dozens of interviews. Rejection is a fact of life. Rejection can leave us with dashed hopes and broken dreams, or it could leave us frustrated, angry, or bitter. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln received more votes than Stephen A. Douglas in the Illinois US Senate seat race. Still, the Illinois legislature used questionable legal maneuvering to send Douglas to Washington instead. Someone asked Lincoln how he felt, and he reportedly replied, “Like the boy who stubbed his toe: I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.” The fear of rejection sometimes chains us in a prison of fear, preventing us from taking risks that could lead to a new and brighter future. We all know the humiliation of being rejected, overlooked, ignored, and left for another. We also know what it feels like to be unable to actualize our persons, talents, and dreams in the way we would like. But we need to hold fast to the hope of Christ that the kingdom of God is among us, and ultimately, we are all joyously accepted if we turn to our suffering Savior.

We are sometimes quick to label others as “foreigners.” Perhaps they dress “funny,” speak with a heavy accent, have darker or lighter skin, or practice “odd” customs. Fr. Rolheiser writes that God breaks into our lives in important ways, mainly through “the stranger,” through what’s foreign, through what’s other, and through what sabotages our thinking and blows apart our calculated expectations. Revelation normally comes to us in a surprise, in a form that turns our thinking upside down. Take, for example, the incarnation itself. For centuries, people looked forward to the coming of a messiah, a god in human flesh, who would overpower and humiliate all their enemies and offer them, those faithfully praying for this, honor and glory. They prayed for and anticipated a superman, and what did they get? A helpless baby lying in the straw. Revelation works like that. Therefore, St. Paul tells us always to welcome a stranger because it could, in fact, be an angel in disguise. All of us, I am sure, at some point in our lives, have personally had that experience of meeting an angel in disguise inside a stranger whom we perhaps welcomed only with some reluctance and fear. I know in my own life, there have been times when I didn’t want to welcome a certain person or situation into my life. I live in a religious community where you do not get to choose who you will live with. You are assigned your “immediate family,” and (but for a few exceptions when there is clinical dysfunction) like-mindedness is not a criterion for who is assigned to live with each other in our religious houses. Not infrequently, I have had to live in a community with someone who I would not, by choice, have taken for a friend, colleague, neighbor, or family member. To my surprise, it has often been the person whom I would have least chosen to live with who has been a vehicle of grace and transformation in my life. What’s foreign and other can be upsetting and painful for a long time before grace and revelation are recognized, but it’s what carries grace. God is in the stranger, so we are cutting ourselves off from a major avenue of grace whenever we will not let the foreign into our lives.